Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Hello everyone. Today I'm gonna spend 15 minutes in a somewhat shameless discussion of my book because it's launching this week and I'm really proud of it, and I really wanna encourage you to get your hands on it. Now, the name of the book is Irresistible, The Seven Secrets of the World's Most Enduring Employee Focused Organizations. And it is really the result of 20 or some odd years of my research and consulting and advisory work with companies all over the world. Lots of analysis and a detailed look at the Glassdoor database on what creates, what I call irresistible organizations. What I learned from this process is that if you look at companies in many industries, and you use Glassdoor as a way to measure their effectiveness of taking care of their employees, there's essentially a bell curve of organizations. And it doesn't matter whether you look at size of company growth, rate of company, industry, location, they all have a bell curve.
Speaker 1 00:01:03 And about 10 to 15% of the companies operate at around four to 4.1 to 4.2 in Glassdoor, a whole bunch of them are in the middle, and then there's about 15 or 20% of companies that are rated very poorly by their employees. And if you go back and analyze that database, which I've done for a long period of time, and you look at the companies at the right, the irresistible ones in each industry, you find two or three big things. Number one, they're long lasting enduring companies. They've survived multiple business cycles, they've survived multiple product cycles, they've been through disruption of their industries, and they came out ahead. There's something about them that endures. The second is they're profitable. They're great stocks. Investors love them, they make money, and they're financially driving value to their stakeholders because they're customers like them, which is number three.
Speaker 1 00:01:55 These are companies that are highly respected, endearing brands. These are companies you know and you like. And so the research I did was to take this list of irresistible companies, and I have the list, it's discussed in the book in some detail, and go back and look at what they're doing in their industries to drive this success. And what you find is that sometimes companies just hit the ball out of the park. They have a great product, they're early to market, they've innovated and they've pioneered, and they learned something new that nobody else knew, and they grow like mad. And you know, there's lots of companies like this, Google, Facebook was like this way, Starbucks did this in the retail sector. I mean, on and on and on. But then they run into trouble. Something happens, the market changes, the economy changes, the competitors catch up, and they need to recover, but the irresistible ones do, and they grow again, and they reemerge as stronger companies over time.
Speaker 1 00:02:51 And so what the book talks about through hundreds and hundreds of examples is what are the seven secrets that these companies do that's enduring and repeatable everywhere? And so let me just take a couple minutes and talk about each one, and I encourage you to read the book. And by the way, let me take a couple comments about the book. The book is for three audiences. It's for you as a leader or a manager of your company. It will teach you things about your organization that will make it better, that you can manage as a leader. The second it's for practitioners, consultants, HR people, because of course, there's lots of examples and stories and frameworks that you can learn from as a designer, as a consultant, as an HR person, even as an IT person. And the third, it's really for teams. I wrote the book fully aware that many of you are going to use it as a strategy development guide or handbook to help you figure out what you could be doing better.
Speaker 1 00:03:45 And so I encourage you to use it in your teams, and we will be putting together workshops and workshop materials to go with the book to make that easier. Okay, so really briefly, what are these seven secrets? Well, first of all, when you read the high level about them, you're gonna say, Eh, those aren't really secrets. Those are kind of well known things. Well, they're sort of well known and easy to read, but they're very, very profound and very hard to do. So what's in each chapter is not just a discussion of what the words mean, but the history of this particular domain, what great companies do, how to design your company to embrace these secrets, and some very specific examples and models. The first one, of course is teams not hierarchy. And I've talked about this a lot over the years, but essentially the story is that your company operates at the frontline.
Speaker 1 00:04:35 And that the teams in the individuals who build things, who sell things, who market things, who serve customers, who design things, who do consulting, they're the ones that are adding value. And so the magic of a really responsive, high performing company is interlocking those teams, empowering those teams, training those teams, and designing those teams so that they can constantly change and morph and adapt over time. And you'll read a lot about it in that chapter. We're doing lots more research on this. Our research on org design talks about this, and we're doing a big project this year on productivity. But anyway, that's chapter one. And as you heard about in my podcast about Ukraine, it's actually in some ways how the military operates. So lots and lots of things to read about there. You can read Stanley McChrystal's book on how the military does this, but this is really business stories, Chapter two, work, not jobs.
Speaker 1 00:05:23 Now, I've talked a lot about this in the last six months to a year as we've done the Gwi research. We don't really operate in companies that have fixed jobs anymore. Yes, there are a lot of them, and they are needed, but most jobs morph. They change, they adapt, they merge into other jobs. And over time, as technology advances, the routine work in the job goes away, and you operate at what's called the top of your license more and more and more. And so we need to design our companies around the work, the tasks, the activities, the value statements that we're trying to build for customers, not the jobs the job structure is getting in the way. And there's lots of discussion about that and lots of interesting things to think about on how you decompose work to build a high performing company that is agile and adaptable and continuously improving.
Speaker 1 00:06:13 And productivity. By the way, productivity is a big topic right now coming into this slowdown. And if you're not thinking about your company as work, not jobs, you're gonna have a hard time dealing with productivity. Number three, coach, not boss. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books have been written on leadership. I'm not gonna try to tell you what leadership model to use, but I'll tell you the big story that we see in all of these great companies is they think about managers as caretakers, curators, developers of people, as many CHROs have said. And the one that I remember most important was the woman who used to launch R for a large healthcare company in Northeast. Managers don't own people. Managers are taking care of people on behalf of the organization. And so your job as a manager or your job as a leader is to develop people, coach them, align them, move them into the right jobs, support them and connect them to others, and sometimes help them move out of your group.
Speaker 1 00:07:07 And that chapter's all about this with lots of examples on how to do this. And it is, in some sense, fundamental to building a growing organization. Google's going through a redesign of its management philosophies right now, Starbucks is doing the same thing. It's a really big topic, and we're gonna be introducing a lot of research on that topic next year. Number four, culture, Not rules. As I talked about in the podcast about Ukraine, and this comes up in virtually every company in the exist of a list. There's a reason why they exist. These companies don't exist to make money. They exist because they have a purpose. We'll talk about that in a minute. And that purpose is manifested through its culture. The culture is driven from the top. If the CEO shows up, lates to meetings, if the CEO doesn't know your name, if the CEO criticizes people publicly, if the CEO constantly talks about the financials and doesn't talk about the people, well, that creates a culture <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:08:03 I mean, it may create a high stock price for a while, but it might also create high turnover and misbehavior all over the company. And every one of you is a caretaker of culture. And we'll talk a lot about, in the book, we talk about different types of cultures, the competing values framework and other models for culture. But you can determine what your culture is and you can talk about it, and you can manifest it and improve it if you take it seriously. Rules don't really work. People will break the rules if the culture is misaligned. So that's really the story in number four. Number five, growth, not promotion. Well, you've heard me talk a lot about training and education and development over the years. It's been one of my biggest areas of business. What happens in great companies is everybody's growing all the time, and they don't have to to get promoted to grow.
Speaker 1 00:08:56 In fact, getting promoted is really a sidelined of growth. It is not the purpose of growth. In other words, we want people to feel that they're constantly developing, learning, aligning their personal needs and personal desires and personal aspirations to those of the company, getting access to information and training and support and education as formal as it needs to be. And also when it's appropriate, getting promoted. Getting promoted is not the purpose of getting developed. So as much as I like ROM Sharon and the leadership pipeline, as I used to read years ago, it doesn't work that way anymore. Not everybody can be promoted. Sometimes the company's not growing and there just aren't enough opportunities. But moving people around, giving them new opportunities, cross developmental assignments, talent, marketplaces, internal mobility, these are the keys of high performing companies. And as you read in the book, they manifest themselves in very, very big ways.
Speaker 1 00:09:50 For example, when people move around and grow inside the company, you have much more collective knowledge of what the customers and product sets and competitors do. So when a new competitor enters the market or a product feature changes, you can react much, much more quickly because you've had this development culture for a long time. And by the way, that goes for recessions too. I remember in the 2008 recession when companies were slashing their training budgets, many of those companies were sorry because the cost of educating employees is really relatively low compared to payroll and everything else. And when you do away with that developmental culture, it is very hard to get it back. So that's number five. Number six, purpose not profits. As I've talked about many times, and we have lots of examples of this in the book, profits are not a goal. Profits are an outcome.
Speaker 1 00:10:40 Profits are an outcome of some mission, some purpose, some objective you are trying to fulfill for society, for the community, for your target customer set, for your industry. And your company probably has this or it wouldn't exist. I mean, most companies start with a very strong purpose by the founders, and that's really why they start the company and how it grows. And over time, as it expands and gets more employees in higher costs and more stakeholders and sometimes goes public, it starts to turn into a profit seeking machine. Well, there's nothing wrong with profit seeking, but that can't be the only purpose of the company. As I talked about in another podcast, when I met with Andrew Fastow, who was the CFO of Enron, he told me very specifically that the reason Enron ran into legal and ethical problems because they lost focus on the problem they were trying to solve, and they really chased the money, they chased the numbers, they chased the stock price to the point that a lot of unethical business practice took place.
Speaker 1 00:11:39 So as I talk about in chapter seven, lots of examples of how to refocus on your purpose from which you will be more profitable. By the way, purpose driven companies are admired by their customers. People pay more money to buy products and services from companies that have a purpose, that are sustainable, that are taking care of society. So it's a good business to be conscious, to be aware, and to focus continuously on your purpose and make sure your purpose is relevant to the world we live in today. The final is employee experience, not output. And this one is a big one, and it's changed a lot. When I was first writing the book, employee experience was kind of a tech thing, but it's moved way beyond that. The idea here is that these great companies listen to their employees as voices of the market. The employee knows more about the customer than anyone else in the company.
Speaker 1 00:12:30 Your marketing department doesn't know as much as your employees do. The employees are acting on behalf of your company for customers. They have voted with their lives and their careers to work for you. They wanna do a good job. They wanna improve productivity. They wanna deliver great customer satisfaction. They want you to know how committed they are to the company. But if your company gets in their way, all you're doing is fighting that instinct. And employee experience is all about this. It's about creating tools, systems journeys, development experiences, management behaviors, safety, what we call a healthy organization. So employees can do their jobs well and they're happy. As I talked about in my podcast about the military, the army or the military runs on its stomach. If the food's not good, if their shoes don't fit, if their socks are wet, if their guns get jammed, if they're late, if they don't get enough sleep, they can't fight the war.
Speaker 1 00:13:28 And that's exactly what happens in business. It's not just about throwing wellbeing programs out there and telling everybody to take a mindfulness class. It's really about, as I say, designing the company around the productivity and success and efficiency of your employees daily lives. Now, these seven things sound simple, but they're all complicated. And what I've done in this book, which did take me about seven years to write, is I've really decomposed every one of the seven things into a lot of specific examples and details. There's probably 300 case study examples in this book, Models and frameworks that I've developed over the years, and a set of tips for each secret that you can use. I really wanna encourage you to get your hands on it. It's one of the most exciting projects I've done in my career, and I hope you enjoy it. Use it for yourself as an individual. Use it for yourself as a practitioner or a consultant. Use it for yourself as a leader, as a manager, and bring your team together and talk about these secrets because you can implement them in your company, and I promise you that you can make your company irresistible too. Thank you.
